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Monday, February 7, 2011

According to No Left Turns a fifth-grader in California had to hire a lawyer last week in order to overcome the public school's unwritten prohibition on singing religious songs in a talent show. Meanwhile, a Michigan public school this week voluntarily amended their no weapons-in-school policy so as to permit Sikh students to carry daggers on their persons.

Let's try to understand this. A student talent show competitor is not allowed to sing a song with a Christian theme because expressions of religious sentiment are proscribed in our public schools, but a Sikh is allowed to bring a weapon to school because it's an expression of religious devotion.

This is the sort of wretched reasoning that contemporary liberalism has foisted upon us. Is it any wonder that politicians are embarrassed to identify themselves as liberals?

British Prime Minister David Cameron, following the lead of German Prime Minister Angela Merkel's speech last year, declares that the doctrine of state multiculturalism has failed.

Cameron argues that we must distinguish between the religion of Islam and the ideology of Islamic extremism. A lot of people in the West hope that such a distinction, a distinction between liberals, moderates, and extremists in Islam, is realistic, but I wonder whether Muslims themselves see this as a legitimate distinction.

BillT writes to call our attention to the recent Morning Joe segment in which Chris Matthews, the man who once said that listening to President Obama sent a tingle up his leg, expresses his anger over the administration's willingness to throw Hosni Mubarak under the bus. He states that the way the administration has handled the Egyptian crisis makes him ashamed as an American.

This, of course, doesn't mean that the White House is losing Matthews who speaks for a lot of liberal Democrats and independents, but I'm sure it gives them pause. In the exchange with Pat Buchanan at the end of the segment Matthews sounds like a neo-con: